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Court Rejects Law Limiting Online Pornography

A federal judge in Philadelphia yesterday struck down a 1998 law that made it a crime for Web sites to allow children to gain access to material deemed “harmful.”

The ruling is the second major setback in federal efforts to control Internet pornography. The United States Supreme Court struck down a similar law in 1997.

Senior Judge Lowell A. Reed Jr. of Federal District Court ruled that the law was ineffective, overly broad and at odds with free speech rights. Judge Reed added that there were far less restrictive methods like software filters that parents could use to control their children’s Internet use.

“Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material,” Judge Reed wrote, he said he was blocking the law out of concern that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”

Civil libertarians applauded Judge Reed’s decision as a victory for free speech and creativity on the Internet.

“If this law had gone into effect, it would have resulted into dumbing down of the Internet,” said Chris Hansen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Internet “would have had to be brought down to a level that is acceptable to a 6-year-old and that would have had a devastating effect on the kind of interactions that take place on the Internet,” Mr. Hansen said.

But others were disappointed.

“It’s a very frustrating decision,” said Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough Is Enough, a group that works to protect children from pornography and online predators. “We have an epidemic problem of kids accessing pornographic material online. Pornographers continue to get a free pass on the Internet from our federal courts, and efforts by Congress keep getting trumped.”

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the United States attorney’s office, said the department was reviewing Judge Reed’s 84-page opinion and would decide whether to appeal.

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Under the 1998 law, commercial Web publishers would have been required to request credit card information or other proof of age from Web site users to prevent children from viewing material deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards.” Penalties include a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Congress tried to regulate Internet pornography in 1996 with the Communications Decency Act, but that law that was struck down by the Supreme Court the next year.

In drafting the 1998 law, Congress hoped to pass constitutional muster, narrowing the law to focus on commercial Web sites and defining objectionable material as obscene or that which offends “contemporary community standards.”

In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries receiving certain kinds of federal money to use software filters. The Supreme Court upheld that law in 2003.

Concerning the federal court ruling yesterday, Lawrence Lessig, a professor of constitutional law at Stanford University, said the case indicated that civil libertarians had shifted their stance regarding controls directed at the Internet.

“Civil libertarians have long had a love-hate relationship with filters,” Professor Lessig said, adding that although the A.C.L.U. had argued in this case that filters were preferable, the organization had also expressed concerns about them.

“People buy filters worried about pornography, but then they see they can also block sports, politics and lots of other things, so they block those, too,” Professor Lessig said.

A result, he said, is to reinforce an “infrastructure of filters” that means “less free speech than we would have if the government could only get it right in their approach to limiting pornography.”

Mr. Hansen said the A.C.L.U. has opposed the mandatory use of filters and not the filters themselves.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Court Rejects Law Limiting Pornography On Internet. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe